Breach
“[T]o confront slow violence requires…that we plot and give figurative shape to formless threats whose fatal repercussions are dispersed across space and time.” (Rob Nixon, 2011, p. 10)
BY ANDREA ZEFFIRO
Collision Course
In the image above, the cutout figures of Sundar Pichai, Jack Dorsey, and Mark Zuckerberg collide with the iconography of prominent insurrectionists who breached the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The effigies, like analogue deepfakes, materialize strangely familiar figures—CEOs as violent insurrectionists and violent insurrectionists as CEOs. The installation was conceptualized by the non-profit advocacy organization SumOfUs and mounted outside of the Capitol Building in March 2021, ahead of Pichai, Zuckerberg, and Dorsey’s testimonies before two committees of the House of Representatives on the role of social media in promoting violence, extremism, and misinformation.
I use the image as a jumping off point to think with the quote provided at the start. I ask, what are the historically formless threats the image gives figurative shape to? In other words, what can the image tell us about the entanglements of Big Tech with forms of violence like white supremacy and white nationalism? Connecting with the image through these questions requires looking beyond what is visible in habitual registers (Campt 2017). Habitual registers here mean the customary ways of privileging visual primacy, in which ‘seeing is believing’. Thinking with Campt, I listen for “practices that are pervasive and ever-present yet occluded by their seeming absence or erasure in repetition, routine, or internalization’ (p.4). So, rather than looking at it, I listen for connections and symmetries between things that sound incongruous. Listening here means engaging a unique modality of “perception, encounter and engagement” (Campt 2017 p.4) to “challenge the equation of vision to knowledge” (p.6). In this way, listening to the image is revelatory through the after-affect produced: the compatibility of the seemingly incompatible. The installation conflates the inactions of social media platforms and their CEOs with the activities of the violent insurrectionists, thus linking the Capitol breach and social media platforms. Bringing these two sets of figures into harmony makes it possible to discern interconnected versions of ‘disruption’ to borrow from Big Tech’s lexicon (Daub 2020). The uber-wealthy CEOs of American technology companies who claim their organizations are disrupting the status quo for the betterment of all, and the incensed far-right conspiracy theorists who believe their democracy (i.e., white identity) and traditional values (i.e., Western civilization) are under attack. The installation harmonizes two sets of seemingly discordant beliefs. To this end, by unbinding the image from a specific moment in time and space and linking it to events that precede it and extend beyond it, it is possible to give shape to historically formless threats.
My aim is to experiment with the conceit of the breach. Generally, as a phenomenon, breaches are incredibly obtuse, compounded by the way these events are presented as exceptional to the ordinary function of networks. Except, networks are inherently insecure. “Networks work by leaking,” writes Wendy Hui Kyong Chun. “[W]ithout leaking information there could be no initial connection” (2016 p. 51). If an enduring leak constitutes networks, then networks are always already breached. For Chun, coded systems like social media platforms and crisis are complementary; code completes crisis and crises complete code. “Most succinctly,” explains Chun, “crises are both what network analytics seek to eliminate and what they perpetuate” (p. 68). The breach is not a crisis that can be overcome because enduring leaks are the essence of the internet, networks and platforms. In other words, the breach is a feature, not a failure of coded systems.
My analysis rescripts the U.S. Capitol insurrection, the 2022 “Freedom Convoy,” and the Cambridge Analytica scandal (Adams 2018; Harris 2018) through the slow violence of (data) networks. I listen for the leakiness of networks as modulations of “slow violence,” what Rob Nixon describes as “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (2011 p.2). Disarticulating the breach from a strictly digital domain and placing it in dialogue with non-digital breaches can elucidate the (infra)structural violence of networks, which is constituted by the entanglements of Big Tech with white supremacy and white nationalism and the colonial legacies of resource and knowledge extraction.
It's a feature, not a bug.
On January 6, 2021, the 45th President of the United States inflamed supporters at the “Save America Rally” at the White House Ellipse by repeating false claims about a rigged election and voter fraud, telling the crowd, “If you don’t fight… you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Shortly after 2 p.m., thousands of his supporters physically breached security perimeters at the Capitol grounds. Some of the most active participants were White supremacists and members of far-right militia groups. They wore racist t-shirts, erected hanging gallows outside the Capitol, and waved “Blue Lives Matter,” “Trump 2020,” the Confederate and the Gadsden flags. Over the days that followed, news agencies known to publicly support the former President, along with members of the Republican party, tried to downplay and deny what had happened (see: Drobnic Holan, McCarthy & Sherman 2021).
The storming of the Capitol is a de-facto security breach. Many news headlines that day, such as “Capitol breach prompts urgent questions about security failures” (Leonning 2021), and “Capitol breach raises security concerns” (CBS 2021), focused almost exclusively on the security crises.
Later in the afternoon on January 6th, I caught a Twitter thread asking people to name places with tighter security than the Capitol. Many of the responses were tongue in cheek, such as “my Google account when I login in from another device,” “the Girl Tech Y2K Password Journal”, and “Ashley Madison” (see: Krebs 2015). Other commenters made comparisons to the continuum of incarceration (Wang 2017) with references made to New York City’s public schools and to the NYPD’s practice of patrolling MTA stations for fee evaders in BIPOC communities. Still, yet another commenter posted how before January 6, the lack of security was a ‘feature and not a bug’, comparing the army of federal agents who responded to a similar-sized crowd gathered outside of the White House in June 2020 to protest the police killing of George Floyd, with the starkly different policing response to the rioters who breached the Capitol. In June 2020, the assembled crowd called for an end to police brutality and racial inequality. The reaction from the 45th US President was to send in law enforcement from a host of federal agencies armed with chemical agents and rubber bullets. Compare that scene with the one in January 2021, when only the Capitol Police were initially on hand and rioters roamed freely through the halls of the Capitol, stealing souvenirs, taking selfies, smashing doors, and defacing statues (Chason and Schmidt 2021).
The framing of the lack of security at the Capitol as a ‘feature and not a bug’ is worth listening to more closely. The comment stems from the familiar expression “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature,” a phrase that is said to have originated among computer programmers in the 1970s (Carr 2018). A feature is a functionality meant to be useful to a user, whereas a bug is an error that hampers the feature. The commenter in the Twitter thread suggests that although the lack of security on January 6 seems like an error (or a bug), the lack itself was intentional. The absence of security reverberates the intensions of oppressive systems and structures. The Capitol breach punctuated a string of high-profile events over the last five years when white supremacist organizing culminated in multiple undisguised spectacles. The notion of an embattled white majority that must defend its power by any means necessary, once the preserve of fringe white nationalist groups (Clark 2020), has breached the mainstream.
One year after the Capitol insurrection, on January 29, 2022, the “Freedom Convoy” converged on Ottawa. Although the organizers said they were protesting vaccine mandates and quarantine rules for cross-border truck drivers (see: Ling 2022), by the time the convoy reached Ottawa, The Canadian Press had connected some of the protest organizers to a fossil fuel-funded white supremacist event three years prior, when hundreds of trucks, galvanized by the Yellow Vest movement, assembled a temporary protest at Parliament Hill that featured then-Conservative leader Andrew Sheer as a speaker (Beer 2022; Rabson et al., 2022). The loosely affiliated group of Canadian truck drivers was being led by Unity Canada, a group founded by far-right activist and QAnon conspiracy theorist James Bauder; within a few hours of the brigade of truck-driving protesters arriving in Ottawa, images circulated of trucks and protesters adorned with the Nazi, Confederate and Gadsden flags.
Like the Capitol breach, the occupation in Ottawa, followed by Coutts and Windsor, was met initially with nominal police presence. Tanya Talaga asks, “[w]hose law and whose order is being protected here?” (2022, par. 1). Over three weeks, “protesters” were permitted to occupy Ottawa’s core and disrupt the Canada/US border, which discloses a profound double standard (see also: Adjekum 2022; Diptée 2022). “If these were Black Lives Matter or Idle No More gatherings,” reflects Talaga, “police would have shut them down in a matter of hours, not weeks” (par.7). Just a few months before the “Freedom Convoy”, militarized RCMP officers cleared a barricade on a forest service road on Wet'suwet'en territory that Land defenders had erected to try to block the construction of a multibillion-dollar natural gas pipeline (Barrera 2021; see also: Parrish 2019). Indeed, in the case of the “Freedom Convoy”, the federal government responded astonishingly by invoking the Emergencies Act for the first time since it was passed into law in 1988. But for three weeks, some of the convoy members were given an international stage to promote their beliefs, spread disinformation, and strengthen a network that spans mainstream conservatives, violent white supremacists and bonafide hate groups (Orr Bueno 2019). As UX designer Kayla Heffernan recently explained, “if a software bug lives long enough in the system, it becomes a feature” (Heffernan 2021). Once again, the lack of security is a feature, not a bug.
Breach, please.
The SumOfUs installation was not the first time an effigy of a Big Tech CEO decorated the lawn of the Capitol. In 2018, the advocacy group Avaaz installed 100 life-sized cutouts of Zuckerberg on the southeast lawn of the Capitol ahead of his appearance before a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees in April 2018 (Diaz 2018). Zuckerberg’s testimony came shortly after the revelations went public about how Cambridge Analytica had harvested the private social media activity of more than 50 million Facebook users, developing techniques that it then used to support the 45th President’s 2016 election campaign (Rosenberg, Confessore and Cadwalladr, 2018). Republican party megadonor Robert Mercer had invested $15 million in Cambridge Analytica. Mercer, who earned a Ph.D. in computer science and started his career at IBM, made breakthroughs in language processing and made his fortune as the CEO of Renaissance Technologies. This hedge fund uses algorithms to model and trade on the financial markets (Mayer 2017). Mercer’s daughter, Rebekah Mercer, the director of the Mercer Family Foundation, is a founding investor of Parler, the social media platform associated with conservatives, far-right extremists, and conspiracy theorists (Lerman 2021). Since 2010, the Mercers have donated $45 million to Republican campaigns and another $50 million to right-wing, ultra-conservative non-profits, including groups opposing climate change action. They supported Steve Bannon with $10 million to fund Breitbart (Cadwalladr 2017). Following Zuckerberg’s initial silence about the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the public critique that unfolded because of his reticence to comment on it, he took out full-page ads in several American and British newspapers to apologize for a “breach of trust” (Statt 2018). “This was a breach of trust and I’m sorry we didn’t do more at the time,” Zuckerberg wrote in his apology. “I promise to do better for you.”
The breach of trust Zuckerberg anchors to Cambridge Analytica is not a one-off event. It is an enduring crisis. Chun (2016) argues that crisis is new media’s critical difference: its exception and norms. Accordingly, as Chun explains, coded systems – like social media platforms – are paradoxical because these are systems designed to guarantee our safety and crises that endanger all of us (2016). Notably, platforms play an important role in social justice movement building and collective organizing while leaking personal data, disinformation, and white supremacist ideologies. Platforms are coded to leak with contradictory effects (Chun 2016). In turn, the breach of trust is a consistent and reliable feature of all platforms, not just mainstream social media. Following the Capitol insurrection, hackers programmatically downloaded millions of posts from Parler by taking advantage of the platform’s insecure direct object reference (IDOR) (see: Bushwick 2021). GiveSendGo, the right-wing Christian crowdfunding site the “Freedom Convoy” organizers pivoted to after GoFundMe had shut down their campaign, was hacked. The names and personal details of over 92,000 donors were leaked online (Anti-Defamation League 2022).
The breach can disguise an enduring leak as a contained and singular event brought on by bad actors exploiting or violating vulnerabilities in systems. To this effect, the breach is almost always staged like an error, but it is in fact a sign of a platform’s stability. After a year-long investigation into the Cambridge Analytica data breach, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) fined Facebook in 2019 for “deceiving” users about its ability to keep personal information private. And Facebook paid $4.9bn more than required to the FTC, purportedly to protect Zuckerberg from being named in the complaint (Milmo 2021). According to a shareholder lawsuit, the multibillion-dollar settlement was “an express quid pro quo to protect Zuckerberg from being named in the FTC’s complaint, made subject to personal liability, or even required to sit for a deposition” (Employees’ Retirement System v. Facebook, Inc 2021 p. 8). The suit claims “[t]he risk would have been highly material to Zuckerberg, who is extraordinarily sensitive about his public image and has been reported to have political ambitions” (p. 132)
Make it great. Again, and again.
Even before the 45th President of the United States advocated to “Make America Great Again,” Ronald Regan used the slogan “Let’s Make America Great Again” in 1980 (Regan 1980). In his 1992 presidential announcement speech, Bill Clinton said, “I believe together we can make America great again” (Clinton 1991). And more recently, President Joe Biden refurbished it with “Build Back Better.” These nostalgic utterances insinuate a desire to return to an idealized white heteropatriarchal past (see: Levine 2016). But what happens when stoking fear around the loss of white Christian heteropatriarchal power – the narrative unifying mainstream conservatives, white supremacists and hate groups – breaches the network?
Cambridge Analytica, the Capitol breach, and the “Freedom Convoy” are long-form attacks culminating through the accumulation and deferral of damage over time (Nixon 2011). Indeed, as visible crises, these events were allotted significant attention, almost antithetic to the way Rob Nixon describes slow violence. For Nixon, slow violence is exemplified by “catastrophic acts that are low in instant spectacle but high in long-term effects” (p.10). Naming and eventually containing a crisis is a way to restore a semblance of order. Once calm is reinstated, there is less, if any, attunement to the enduring leak. Therefore, I am interested in how the breach as an enduring crisis of networks interlocks with other geopolitical crises. In 2019, the World Economic Forum identified online data thefts and large-scale cyberattacks as a global threat, placing data breaches alongside global crises like climate change and geopolitical conflict (Myers & Whiting 2019). By entangling digital and non-digital data breaches, my larger aim is to critique the newness of the crisis of security itself.
When discerning the harmonies between Cambridge Analytica, the Capitol breach, and the “Freedom Convoy,” the entanglements between Big Tech, white supremacy and white nationalism and the colonial legacies of resource and knowledge extraction are difficult to downplay. I am not looking for patterns in which correlation implies causation. Returning to the framing of the breach I began at the start of this piece, in which I positioned it as an enduring leak in the network, I have tried to listen for modulations of the breach playing through digital and non-digital forms. Listening to these rhythms and repetitions across time and space and at various speeds and scales might provoke an expansion of our perception of what constitutes harm by taking seriously the (infra)structural violence of networks that have become unfastened from their original causes (Davies 2019).
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Mél Hogan, Tessa Brown, Clementine Oberst, and Sam McEwan for their thoughtful and generative comments on earlier drafts.
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Andrea Zeffiro is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies and Media Arts, and Academic Director of the Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship, McMaster University.
